I’m doing some things at the 2013 Nation Young Writers Festival in Newcastle in the first weekend of October. They will be fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun.

I’m doing a reading at a show called First Time For Everything (Friday October 4th, 8-10pm), a reading at a show called Hi, Heartbeak (Oct 4th, 11pm – midnight) and appearing at a panel entitled How Not To Be A Douche (Saturday October 5th, 2:30-3:30pm).

If you don’t want any of that, there’s heaps of cool other stuff going down, worth checking out the site if you’re in the area.

If you haven’t noticed, it’s an election year! Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy or whatever.

To celebrate, myself and journalist/funk enthusiast Tom Tilley will be live on triple j Saturday night to run you through electoral results, make jokes and play SIK AZ BEATZ.

We’ll be talking to some pollies, crossing to party headquarters, premiering a brand new political protest song from The Beards and generally trying to make it not painful.

We go live from 6pm AEST; you can stream it here.

Of course, it’s all pointless, what with the Harlem Globetrotters already predicting the outcome with their psychic basketball skills: 

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Good chat with smart man.

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Do yourself a favour and beam at the contents of thischarmingcharlie.tumblr.com

E.g. –

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At 25:00, on risk taking:

I think if…what you’re doing does not have the possibility of failing, then by definition you’re not doing anything new. That’s really sort of the way it is.

If you know how to do what it is that you’re doing and/or you’ve seen it done before, then you’re not doing anything. So the only way you can do anything new or interesting is to open yourself up to that risk of failing and in that sense I try to look at failure and success both as neutral things. It’s hard and I’m not always successful at accepting failure but I feel like I need to keep reminding myself of that: that this is the only way that it’ll be worth anything at all. Maybe it won’t be, but it definitely won’t be if I don’t do that.

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